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Bolin: SEC Hoops Not Disrespected

Eric W. Bolin has been a sports reporter for the Times Record since October 2012. He covers sports, focusing on Northside High School. A native of Stilwell, Okla., Eric came to Fort Smith after working three years at ESPN. He is a graduate of Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Okla., and holds a bachelor's degree in mass communication.

At some point, hopefully, we’ll all be smart enough to stop this silly perpetuating of inaccuracy.

Hopefully.

It’s not likely to happen any time soon, though. And, in fact, it seems like it’s actually getting worse.

I’m talking about this thing we do when college postseasons come around, the thing where we say such-and-such conference was disrespected. Or so-and-so is much better than we thought they were.

The biggest example, shockingly (read: “not shocking at all”) is the Southeastern Conference in basketball this year. All three teams to qualify for the NCAA Tournament made the Sweet 16. Apparently because of this the SEC has gone from the worst of the “power” conferences to closer to the middle. Heck, in some fans’ eyes it’s only second behind the Big Ten. Maybe. Maybe behind.

But it’s not correct. It’s not even close. The conference wasn’t disrespected. The SEC was, and is, an awful basketball conference in 2014. The results of three teams doesn’t change that.

In baseball, proponents of sabermetrics talk about sample size. It’s a simple mathematical/statistical principle. Over a long enough timeline, everything reverts to the mean. Hot spikes are almost unsustainable. And that’s precisely what’s happened in the NCAA Tournament.

A regular season that consists of 30 games, give or take, tends to yield more realistic ideas of how good or bad a team may or may not be. Three games in a tournament over the matter of a week makes up less than 9 percent of a team’s results during a season. And this is if the team played just 30 games before the Big Dance began.

Arkansas, the fourth-best finisher in the SEC, obviously gains from this line of thinking, which is perhaps why it’s so popular in these parts. If Kentucky and Tennessee appear better than their slotting, an 11-seed and an 8-seed, then it stands to reason they should have been seeded higher. Or lower, whatever. The number next to the school’s name should have been smaller is the chief point.

And if Kentucky and Tennessee should have received stronger consideration, then next in-line should as well. Then next and next and so on and so on. But it’s evident to those who even believe Arkansas should have been an NCAA Tournament team it’s a slippery slope. Where’s the cut-off? If a conference is respected or disrespected, are they so from their first-place finisher to their last-place? Was just the middle of the conference disrespected or given too much respect? It’s not a science. There is no definitive answer.

It’s like this in college football, too. The Big Ten going 6-2 in bowl games means absolutely zilch. Does anyone actually think the SEC wasn’t the best conference in the country, even though teams from it went 0-2 in Bowl Championship Series bowls?

Of course not. That would be ridiculous.

Strange things happen in one-off games, especially tournaments. That’s part of what’s made March Madness so iconic. That doesn’t mean Tennessee was actually any better than it showed through the regular season. And it definitely doesn’t mean the Razorbacks were hosed by the committee by not being selected.